


Weakest Thing in You

by winter_rogue



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Daemons, Gen, HDM Fusion, His Dark Materials AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-15
Updated: 2012-08-15
Packaged: 2017-11-12 04:36:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/486761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winter_rogue/pseuds/winter_rogue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There wasn’t any way to train for this, or more accurately there were ways but even SHIELD wasn’t quite that unscrupulous.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weakest Thing in You

**Author's Note:**

> written for angst_bingo prompy "lacerations"
> 
> Potential Trigger Warnings for non-graphic torture
> 
> This is part of a much larger HDM headcanon AU I've been poking at. Un'beta'd, all mistakes are mine.

There wasn’t any way to train for this, or more accurately there were ways but even SHIELD wasn’t quite that unscrupulous. It was a line in the sand they warned you about but they didn’t force you to confront from a guy you shared mnm’s with in the breakroom. They trained them to withstand torture through various non-lethal torture methods, there was very little they that could shock him, but they’d never done this, never--

There was a look sometimes, in Stavol’s eye, when someone brushed too close to the white arctic fox daemon. A look that made Clint wonder if Natasha had born the kind of hands on training which had previously only inhabited some of his worst nightmares. It made him shiver in his bonds, more than just the chill caused by rapidly cooling sweat.

He and Eliola had managed to hide and evade capture for nearly eleven days before the enemy caught up to them. Desert wasn’t their strongest clime, Eli being built for temperate canopies and dense forest. She’d tucked herself into the collar of his jacket and tried not to strangle him in the heat. In the end, they’d been caught by a witch working with the gun gunners, her sharp eyed hawk daemon catching up to them before they had reached the canyons for cover.

Clint had faith that SHIELD (Phil) would come for them. He’d learned that faith after a lifetime of disappointment. They just had to hold on long enough for an extraction.

He’d been tortured before,m captured and held prisoner and waterboarded but none of that could have prepared him for this. For-- there was nothing in the world as terrible as this, this feeling, like an icy, oily gloves reaching right into his soul and clawing at it.

Eli whined softly, her small heart beating a thunderous rhythm against her soft belly. She flinched and twisted as best she could-- collared and cobbled at her neck and paws --when they reached for her. The lead interrogator didn't even seem to hesitate, tanned hands grabbing the tawny pine marten daemon by the back of her neck and her tail. Clint yelled hoarsely from where they’d found him, pulled fitfully at the zipties biting into his wrists and watched-- his heart beating and breaking --Eli freeze, silent and painfully still.

The man’s hands felt like iron bars around Clint’s throat. His mouth fell silent as the moment dragged on, bile rising in the back of his throat. He couldn't-- he couldn't speak, all of his words drying up in his throat and crumbling to sand, his mind screaming with no sound escaping his lips.

Eli scratched and thrashed effectively, her small body no match for their tormentor’s chilling competence. Clint wondered, distantly, how many other poor fucks had fallen victim to this particular interrogation method.

The man stretched Eli out against the bare metal table, the only other piece of furniture in the room besides the chair he was tied to. Thick and surprisingly nimble fingers attaching the cobbles on her fore and hind paws to D-rings screwed into the surface. A shaft of hot, dusty sunlight fell across the soft, yellow tan bib at her throat, vulnerable. Eli squeaked pitifully but the hand eventually withdrew and Clint pulled ragged breaths of air into his lungs.

It was the last relatively easy breath he took. Clint made himself watch, hold onto Eli’s frantic glazed eyes and will as much strength into her as he had in his body while the man-- six foot two, dishwater blond, with a rusty English accent and a serpent tattoo on his left wrist --made careful cuts into her thin skin. They were never deep enough to cause death, tiptoeing down that line between the kind of damage a daemon could take (more than your average animal, and Eli was strong, hearty, a survivor despite her delicate bones and small size) and what would kill them.

She struggled and snapped at the man until her strength waned, and after that she was silent, shivering fitfully against the hot metal-- beneath the razor sharp edge of the K-bar. They didn’t even ask him any questions.

Clint felt like his heart was being cut out of his chest with a pair of safety scissors. Cut out and cut up until all that was left of him was ribbons. He didn't know how long they could hold out against this. Clint prayed to any god out there who listened to snipers and SHIELD agents that they wouldn't have to find out (a less pathetic action that he might have thought a year ago, before a living god touched down in a dusty field in New Mexico).

Black kitted commandos broke through the interrogation room door hours or a lifetime later, the hallway boiling with tear gas. There was the not too distant sound of machine gun fire, wolves howling and predator cats screaming as they clashed with the gun runners.

As the air cleared, Clint became conscious of a voice calling to him, a note of panic in their tone. He couldn't bring himself to look away from Eli. Her chest rose and fell too rapidly, fur matted with bright red blood.

“Barton! Agent Barton, can you answer me?”

Eli’s breath shuddered out in a shaky sigh and her eyes slipped closed. Clint opened his mouth to speak, to call out to her, to tell the voice to get out of his head and stop trying to distract him. All he could manage was a soft, garbled croak. There were no words left in his body just a deep, intrinsically animal _fear_.

Cool steel slipped across his skin and the zip ties fell away from his wrists.

“Shh, shh Clint it’s okay, you're going to be okay.” Coulson helped him out of the chair. Clint practically fell onto the table, reached out shaking hands for Eliola. He’d never before been so afraid to touch her.

“Come on, it’s okay. Grab her, we need to get out of here.”

Khallise, Phil’s dark grey and black spotted Egyptian Mongoose daemon slithered up onto the empty seat and leapt onto the table top. Her long narrow clawed paws click-clacked across the shiny metal. They tore through the leather restraints tying Eli down with admirable dexterity. A rough pink tongue darted out and licked a slim stripe up the underside of the pine marten's throat.

“Come along lazybones, you aren't dead yet.” Where Phil’s voice was rarely ever anything but the epitome of stoic professionalism, Khallise’s dipped and chittered like someone laughing at you behind your back. She nipped ELi’s ear teasingly and nudged her carefully onto shaking legs. “Come along, come along, we must be going like the Man said.”

Eli grumbled drunkenly but stumbled obediently into Clint’s trembling arms, tucker face into the hot, sweaty crook of his arm and shook.

Khal leapt off the table and scampered along at Phil’s side as he lead the way out of the nightmare and into the black night.

END

**Author's Note:**

> Eliola [link](http://images.wikia.com/weaselinfo/images/c/c2/Pine-Marten-04.jpg)
> 
> Khallise [link](http://archive.fieldmuseum.org/tanzania/species_images/Results_H_ichneumon_311_a.jpg)


End file.
